Day 99 of LA’s Vision Zero failure to end traffic deaths by 2025.
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Please join me in welcoming back — and thanking — Los Angeles Bicycle Attorney Josh Cohen of Cohen Law Partners, who renewed their sponsorship of this site for another year.
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Streets Are For Everyone, aka SAFE, unveiled their legislative agenda for the current session yesterday.
The group is currently co-sponsoring four bills, hoping to add to their impressive record of success in getting bills passed and signed into law:
AB 891
Quick-Build Project Pilot Program.
Stance: Co-Sponsor (Priority)
AB 891 establishes the Quick-Build Project Pilot Program within the department’s maintenance program to accelerate low-cost projects on the state highway system and fund at least six projects by December 31, 2028.
SB 455
Electric motorcycles and electric bicycles.
Stance: Co-Sponsor (Priority)
SB 455 improves labeling requirements for electric bicycles, e-mopeds, etc. It prohibits labeling 2-wheeled electric vehicles as electric bicycles if they can reach a speed exceeding 28 miles per hour. It also mandates customer notifications for products that no longer meet the electric bicycle definition, with violations subject to criminal penalties.
SB 720
Automated traffic enforcement system programs.
Stance: Co-Sponsor (Priority)
SB 720 would establish a new opt-in red light camera program with $100 civil fines (not moving violations) to the owners of vehicles that run red lights. There are stricter privacy equity provisions, solving many reasons why most cities don’t use the current red light camera law.
AB 954
State transportation improvement program: bicycle highway pilot program.
Stance: Co-Sponsor (Priority)
This bill would create a bicycle highway pilot program to test its feasibility in two yet-to-be-named major metropolitan areas. Bicycle highways are networks restricted to bicyclists intended for trips primarily at least 5 miles in length at travel speeds of up to 25 miles per hour.
The traffic safety advocacy group is also supporting 27 bills, while requesting amendments to six bills.
SAFE also opposes three others, including a ban on towing or impounding vehicles for unpaid tickets, and removing high-speed rail funding from the state’s cap-and-trade program.
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Speaking of SAFE, the group says fully funded and shovel-ready improvements to deadly Crystal Springs Drive in LA’s Griffith Park are being needlessly delayed by red tape, three years after Andrew Jelmert was killed on the street while training for the AIDS/LifeCycle fundraising ride.
This Griffith Park active transportation plan, the funding, and the contracts to begin the most significant safety improvement upgrade to Griffith Park in decades, possibly ever, have been ready to start since mid-2024. We have recently found out they are currently held up in bureaucratic red tape by LA Recs and Parks.
As we come up on the eve of the third anniversary of Andrew Jelmert’s fatality, there is still no target date to start construction on the expected safety improvements on Crystal Springs Drive. Despite the initial push and commitment from the city to transform parts of the park and safeguard the lives of those who use it, the bureaucracy has caused safety improvements to grind to a screeching halt.
The group urges you to email Recs and Parks General Manager Jimmy Kim to demand that that Crystal Spring Drive be made safe for the pedestrians, bicyclists, families and kids who need it the most.
Just click on the link above to email Kim and other city officials. You can click here to find a customizable sample letter (scroll all the way down).
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Today’s common theme is Trump’s tariffs and their effect on the bike industry.
And your next bike.
- Santa Clara’s Vintage Electric Bikes makes their customized, retro-styled ebikes here in the US, but says “there’s just no f***ing way” they, or the rest of the bike industry, can survive using 100% American parts.
- A Georgia manufacturer who ships bicycle components to over 33 countries around the world worries how the effects of Trump’s tariffs will affect them.
- Bicycling Australia says it’s anyone’s guess what will happen when the effects of Trump’s tariff’s reach Down Under.
- And Momentum strikes the right tone, arguing that Trump’s tariffs and the trade war they engender are serious trouble for the global bike industry.
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It looks like the first leg of Metro’s Rail-to-Rail Trail is open along Slauson Ave.
It’s open!! Or at least a little stretch of it! Slauson bike lane. So happy!
byu/cesgar21 inBikeLA
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps going on.
Seriously? Boston’s mayor admits that she made a mistake in ripping out the barriers protecting a number of bike lanes, and pledges that not only would they be replaced, but some car-tickler bendy-post bollards would also be replaced with more permanent and durable materials. I’m sure her dramatic change of heart had nothing to do with the outrage of bike-riding voters as she prepares to face re-election.
No bias here. Former Top Gear presenter James May says he’s a “big fan” of urban bicycling, but bike lanes are overdone and “pedantic.”
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
This one could go under either category, as a 21-year old man in the Netherlands was hospitalized, and a 22-year old woman knocked off her bicycle, after they were shot with gel guns — similar to paintball guns — as they were riding their bikes, following an argument with kids on e-fatbikes.
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Local
A state grant is funding bike and pedestrian safety improvements near affordable housing developments in South LA, including a traffic circle and two miles of protected bike lanes. And yes, it also includes five mile sharrows, which have been shown to be worthless at best, if not downright dangerous.
Police are looking for a hit-and-run driver who killed a woman riding an e-scooter on South Figueroa, in the Vermont Vista neighborhood of South LA.
State
The Orange County Cycling Business Coalition, which could use a snappier name, is hosting a Community Bike Tour exploring Irvine, offering either a five-mile ride loop or a 25-mile ride examining some of the city’s 113 miles of off-street bike trails and 286 lane miles of on-street bikeways. Which translates to 143 miles of streets with bike lanes, because lane miles counts each side of the street separately.
The beachside city of Del Mar preliminarily approved a new ebike ordinance; the new ordinance would include “obeying traffic laws, yielding to pedestrians and wearing a helmet,” as well as requiring ebike users to use bike lanes on any street that has them. Although it doesn’t say who would be required to wear a helmet; they lack legal authority to require them for anyone over 18.
A Santa Barbara professor shares the facts, and the heartbreak, of bike theft.
San Luis Obispo is the latest California city to adopt a Vision Zero Plan. Let’s just hope they take it more seriously than Los Angeles has.
Sad news from Clovis, where a boy was killed when he was struck by a driver while riding his bicycle; and yes, the woman who hit him stayed at the scene and didn’t appear to be under the influence.
Los Altos has removed parking and installed semi-green bike lanes on iconic El Camino Real.
National
A Utah man took his 70-something parents on a 400-mile bike ride across the Canadian border, even though they were bicycling beginners.
Reports of blocked bike lanes are “exploding” in Denver, forcing people to ride out into traffic, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. And kind of like pretty much every other American city.
About time. Colorado legislators have introduced a bill to increase penalties for killing someone on a bicycle by reclassifying the crime of careless driving – causing death as a felony, rather than a misdemeanor.
Interesting idea from DC, where officials launched a new traffic safety campaign by having people walk near busy intersections wearing old-school sandwich signs, with messages like “Follow the rules of the road. Slow down. Don’t nip corners. Don’t jump the gun.”
Atlanta could be preparing for a second round of ebike vouchers, after funding 579 new bikes the first time around. Which would make it one more round than California’s seemingly moribund program has managed so far.
International
London bike riders seem largely unimpressed with the new bus service shuttling them across a busy bridge, saying it’s a far cry from the tunnel under the Thames they had been promised.
Even a British reality star, and distant relative of King Charles, had his bicycle stolen while locked up in London, despite using three separate bike locks worth a combined 250 bucks.
This is why people keep dying on the streets. An 11-year old boy in the UK was killed when a bus driver honked at him while passing, startling the kid into swerving towards and under the bus — yet an inquest ruled the driver didn’t do anything wrong.
Competitive Cycling
Reggie Miller urged UAE Team Emirates to make him an honorary member of the cycling team, with the 59-year old former NBA star promising to trade much needed lessons in how to shoot baskets. Which could offer a whole new dimension to bike racing by painting a three-point line on the course and giving the peloton a ball or two. Or maybe each team gets a ball, and has to sink a three-pointer before proceeding. It could work.
Finally….
A bike helmet maker says you need more padding on your butt. A 12-year old cat has probably ridden more cross-country miles than you have.
And sometimes you don’t need GPS to know where you’re riding.
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin.
